Stateline New South Wales

Reading to Live

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Reading For Life is a new literacy program being rolled out in primary schools. It matches a student with a volunteer and together they spend about an hour a week doing one-on-one learning, but this is not a Department of Education initiative, it is being developed and is being rolled out by a company which is better known for making soup, tea, ice cream and moisturisers. Sarah Schofield reports.

WARREN JOHNSON, READING FOR LIFE: We estimate that we are looking at about one in five children who are struggling with learning, so, if you are looking at a population of say a million children in New South Wales, you would be looking in the vicinity of 200,000 kids; so, the need is huge.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: Unilever is a multinational company, which produces food, drinks and toiletries. In 2003, after a restructure involving significant redundancies, to help boost morale, the company asked its remaining employees what it could do to help the wider community. At the top of the list was literacy.

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: The employees were saying, “We don't want our children to be coming out of school doing worse than their predecessors”, so that was putting the onus was on us, to say, “Well, what can we do about it?”

SARAH SCHOFIELD: To turn the idea into something tangible, Unilever hooked up with a charity called Learning Links, which helps children with learning difficulties and developmental delays, from babies through to school aged children. Together they created the Reading for Life program.

WARREN JOHNSON, LEARNING LINKS: The program sees volunteers from businesses and corporates leave the workplace for about an hour or so once every week, visit the local school and work on a reading program with a student who has been assessed with having difficulties with reading skills.

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: My name is Anthony Toovey. I've been at Unilever six years now, in various roles. I've always been in marketing. At the moment I'm a brand manager in the tea category. Reading is something that I've always been very passionate about, I’ve always loved reading, and, so, when Unilever said they were going to be doing this program, for quite a while I thought it would be a great opportunity to help kids enjoy more something that I have always enjoyed.

NICK GODDARD, COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER, UNILEVER: It is a 45 minute session. It’s the local schools. They either walk to the school or they drive. It’s about an hour out per week, and the business does not sort of say, “Okay, you only have to do 37 hours this week”. You still have to work 38 hours, you still have got objectives to meet and goals to meet; so, you are truly giving up your own time.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: Isn't this just a bit like skipping school, you know, you get let out of work for an hour every week?

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: That is something you get from some of your colleagues at times, but it is not like that. At the end of the day, our workload does not change if we choose to volunteer for an hour a week. Unilever is great in that they are flexible and meetings can be scheduled around your commitment but you don't get one hour’s less work a week.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: So far, 1000 students have taken part in Reading For Life across Australia and New Zealand. Unilever wants to see 10,000 children through the program by 2010.

Isaac Bell-Herbert goes to Epping North Primary School and for the past six months he has had Anthony Toovey as his reading buddy.

What is it like having a buddy coming to school every week and reading to you and playing games with you? What’s that like?

ISAAC BELL-HERBERT: It is fun because I get to learn new stuff every week.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: Do you think it is odd that your employer allows you to do this? Not all employers do this.

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: When I first was looking for an employer, at uni, Unilever jumped out at me, because of all the things it does in the community, and so, when they announced they were doing Reading For Life, it was another thing they were doing, not necessarily an odd thing.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: The Reading For Life program has been warmly welcomed by teachers and principals.

CHERYL HARBRIDGE, RELIEVING PRINCIPAL, EPPING NORTH PRIMARY: This is our second year and it has been a really successful program. In fact, I would say that 100 per cent of our children have not only improved their reading outcomes but the most valuable thing, I feel, is the attitudes of the children to reading. It is just a really positive attitude they develop through the program.

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: So, what we’ve got to do is we have got to do, to land on that square, we’ve got to come up with a word, a compound word, that starts in “bed”. So, remind me, first of all, what is a compound word?

ISAAC BELL-HERBERT: Something with two words.

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: Do you have an example?

ISAAC BELL-HERBERT: Football.

ANTHONY TOOVEY, UNILEVER EMPLOYEE: Football. Perfect.

WARREN JOHNSON, LEARNING LINKS: The program was put together by educators, speech pathologists and education psych, and it’s very much built around games, colourful games, interactions between the buddies, it is supposed to be fun, it’s stimulating for both the volunteer and the child, and really “fun”, I think, is the catch phrase of the program, because, if children are not having fun, they are not learning.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: What is best thing that you do with Anthony?

ISAAC BELL-HERBERT: Reading, because it helps me improve my reading.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: Do you like reading?

ISAAC BELL-HERBERT: Yes, I read at home a lot.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: How was your reading before and how is it now?

ISAAC BELL-HERBERT: Well, my reading before was not as good as I read now, because he has helped me a lot.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: The program is targeted at students in grades 2 to 4, whose reading, comprehension, accuracy and fluency is 18 months to two years behind that of their peers. Each student understandings a diagnostic test before and after taking part, to track their progress.

WARREN JOHNSON, LEARNING LINKS: We were absolutely astonished to discover that we had average improvements in students of eight months for reading accuracy, nine months for reading comprehension and six months for reading fluency. Self-esteem also went up. Their ability to recognise sight words, on average, improved by 33 words. These are incredible learning gains over such a short period.

SARAH SCHOFIELD: To meet its target of 10,000 kids by 2010, Unilever has convinced other large corporations to get involved. The likes of ANZ, Rio Tinto, Cadbury Schweppes and the legal firm, Allens Arthur Robinson, just to name a few, are now involved in offering the Reading for Life program. The University of Western Sydney has also incorporated the program into its curriculum for students studying a masters of educational psychology.

Do you think the advantages of this program outweigh any downtime or any difficulties of having your staff head out the door for an hour every week?

NICK GODDARD, COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER, UNILEVER: By far. The engagement, the improved engagement, we have with our employees, their stronger commitment to the business, their better understanding of Unilever and its values is, clearly, the tangible benefit, and that’s a small price to pay, to initiate this program, to get that sort of reward for the business.